Broncos 30 years: The 30 biggest moments in the club’s history
CELEBRATING 30 years of the Broncos, The Courier-Mail this week counts down the 30 biggest moments in the club’s history, as voted by our sportswriters. Here’s No. 24-19, writes Paul Malone.
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CELEBRATING 30 years of the Broncos, The Courier-Mail this week counts down the 30 biggest moments in the club’s history, as voted by our sportswriters. Here’s No. 24-19.
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24 Crushers fold, 1997
The Crushers folded after the 1997 season, leaving the Brisbane market to the Broncos for another 20-plus years despite every effort this decade to add a new club from the state capital.
The ARL competition’s second-team experiment was derailed by the unfolding of the Super League, leaving the owners, including the QRL, unable to cover costs.
The Crushers, who played their home matches at Suncorp Stadium at a time when the Broncos were at the southside ANZ Stadium, lasted three years averaging home crowds of fewer than 8000 in their third and final year, with a low-water mark of 2364 for a game against Illawarra.
“It was proved that two teams in Brisbane didn’t work,’’ Broncos chairman Paul Morgan said in a 1996 interview.
23 Wendell Sailor defects to rugby union
Sailor got to thinking rugby and the Wallabies would provide the international stage he craved during rugby league’s 2000 World Cup in England, joining the Reds for the 2002 season.
Standing near the Ballymore turnstiles one day in his early days as a Red, Sailor remarked to reporters: “Watch these babies spin’’.
A big personality, Sailor played 196 first grade games for the Broncos.
Bronco Lote Tuqiri code-hopped also, and they played in the 2003 Rugby World Cup final together, managing 37 and 67 Tests respectively for the Wallabies.
Despite the defections of Sailor and Tuqiri, it took some at the Broncos time to absorb that the days of players routinely accepting “unders’’ to stay at the club were gone.
Younger stars Karmichael Hunt and Israel Folau defected to AFL in 2009, a money-strewn league-to-AFL pathway has not been revisited since by the AFL.
22 Lockyer shifted to five-eighth, 2004
Darren Lockyer had taken fullback play in a direction no one had really been before, with his ball playing augmenting his running game.
In the 2004 pre-season, Bennett won him over to a move to five-eighth.
“The move exemplifies how Darren is the ultimate team man. I am asking him to turn his back on that (niche as fullback) because we were struggling in the halves and we needed to fix the problem,’’ said Bennett at the time, reacting to Ben Ikin’s retirement and Scott Prince’s linking with Wests Tigers.
Lockyer admits he often liked in his career to use as motivation the chance to prove sceptics wrong.
Bennett took umbrage at criticism of his decision, even though much of the commentary wondered why the world’s best fullback needed to play anywhere else.
The three-time Dally M fullback of the year was named NRL five-eighth of the year in his first season there (and 2006-07 as well).
21 The Broncos miss finals, 2010
For the first time since 1991, after 18 straight trips to the finals, the club failed to make the finals.
“It’s an amazing feat _ I don’t know if it will ever happen again,” second-year Brisbane coach Ivan Henjak said.
The Broncos lost their last four games in 2010 to finish 10th with an 18-16 home loss to Canberra in the last round.
It didn’t help that Darren Lockyer (ribs) was out injured for the last four games, with Henjak overruling Lockyer’s opinion that he could play the Raiders game.
“Brisbane fans wake to a sobering reality — the unthinkable has happened,’’ wrote The Courier-Mail’s Matt Marshall.
Key players Karmichael Hunt, Dave Taylor and Tonie Carroll had left after 2009 and centre Justin Hodges did not play at all after suffering a serious knee injury in the pre-season.
20 Henjak sacked, 2011
Coach Henjak was sacked three weeks before the start of the 2011 season.
Henjak’s relationship with some senior players soured over late 2010 and the board stepped in to appoint Anthony Griffin, fearing what the season would become under the intensity of Henjak, Bennett’s former assistant coach.
In 2014, Henjak was back as coach of Intrust Super Cup team Sunshine Coast and had quit by May that year.
19 The 2000 premiership
Shane Webcke looks back at his efforts to play a preliminary final six weeks after breaking his forearm with a word seemingly not in Webcke’s vocabulary.
“I was petrified of one thing, breaking that arm and leaving my team to play a man down,’’ he said.
“A greater part of it was selfishness because I knew how special grand finals are to be a part of.
“I was told it was going to take 12 weeks at the start. My arm wasn’t healed. Wayne made me play the preliminary final and it was the right call. I remember it was very, very sore before the grand final.’’
The Kevin Walters-captained side made it five premierships in nine years behind a phenomenal pack, including Webcke, Gorden Tallis, and the emerging Petero Civoniceva.
“We just wore teams down,’’ Walters says of a path to glory capped off by a 14-6 win over the Roosters in the grand final.’’
Teetotaller Wayne Bennett reckoned he had the second beer of his life (the other was after a win in 1989) amid the victory celebrations.
“I’m Wayne Bennett and I’m having this stubby because I can,’’ he said before downing the beer to ecstatic reactions from his players.
Tomorrow: No. 13-18
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